Electronic commerce that utilizes the Internet to sell goods and services to customers has been increasing in its scope and scale at increasing rates. One of the main limitations on this form of commerce is the lack of direct interaction between buyers and sellers that is present in most face-to-face transactions. Merchants and other sellers of goods and services have been hindered at times by an inability to identify trustworthy buyers who electronically request to purchase items while providing credit card or other payment information as well as a shipping address. Similarly, buyers may be hesitant to purchase items from a merchant who may only be found using an anonymous web site.
To address these problems, some e-commerce web sites have provided rating mechanisms in which buyers and sellers may provide ratings and/or feedback providing a mechanism for both good and bad experiences of prior transactions to serve as a form of reputation data for both buyers and sellers. These rating mechanisms may be part of an integrated e-commerce system, such as an on-line auction web site, in which parties to the transactions may providing ratings and comments regarding the other party to the transaction. These rating mechanisms may also be part of a review and rating system in which customers of web sites are asked to provide feedback as part of an on-line survey once a transaction has been completed.
These rating mechanisms typically collect large numbers of rating data records from the parties to the transactions that are accumulated within a large database of feedback data. The records may be searched by subsequent buyers and sellers to determine if a future transaction involving the other party may be advisable. In order for the search results obtained by subsequent buyers and sellers to be meaningful, large amounts of feedback data must be obtained, maintained, and processed as a reputation of a seller, for example, may best be seen in the large number of satisfied customers even when a few dissatisfied customers may also provide feedback. In addition, a seller may receive feedback indicating that a problem was quickly addressed that may provide useful data to subsequent buyers.
All of this feedback data creates a large database that must be on-line and available for users if the data is to be useful. Providing computational resources for this large database, both in terms of storage capacity as well as computational processing of database requests, may limit the ability of some merchants and on-line e-commerce services to provide these rating mechanisms. Large centralized databases that provide 24/7 availability are typically complex and expensive to operate. As such, alternate mechanisms for providing these rating mechanisms without utilizing a large centralized database may overcome these limitations in existing systems.
These limitations of existing commerce systems limit the effectiveness of these systems to buyers and sellers. New mechanisms to connect interested buyers and sellers who use these commerce systems may address these limitations and thus increase on-line sales and corresponding profits for these sellers and commerce system operators.